I was surprised how sudden the change was - I didn't become a dad to my kid, I became a dad to all kids within sight or sound. Sure, most of the time I don't have to do anything, but I certainly notice much more now.

I already feel like this and I don't have kids or want kids.

This. Also, the feelings have become stronger as I age.

So much stronger. I went from completely understanding the "we should have restaurants/theatres/etc. where no kids are allowed" people to finding the notion totally incompatible with a healthy society. I love kids. I want to see them thrive and grow. I want to invest my taxes into their success. I vote for affordable daycare. I vote for expanding school programs. I take kids in my complex to look at stuff with the telescope. I 3d print things with them. I ask them about their lives and wonder what they'll be like. I have so much more patience for them. They matter more than I do, now. That's about it.

Before mine was born at the workplace they complained about how long paternity leave was and how unfair it was to those without kids. Now that I'm on the other side, anybody who thinks that is a jerk. Yes likely everyone deserves more time off, but don't you dare think that paternity leave is "time off".

I agree that it's crazy to act as though parental leave is anything like a vacation. I would prefer to sleep on my vacations. It's wildly unpopular among people who don't have kids, but I've come to think we should collectively want society to invest in kids, and that means parents as well. Raising kids is hard. It benefits society tremendously when it's done well.

The best ways seem to be things kids get directly, such as school lunches, better libraries, affordable child care, equipment at schools, etc. where parents don't need to be handed cash by the government.

But you're right, people get very up in arms about it (what about us?!). Society with an uneducated/un-cared for generation of kids is terrifying, though. I'm currently watching my oldest kids head into graduation with a cohort of kids who are clearly less educated than my graduating class was, and I'm dreading the knock-on effects. I feel for the kids too, but looking at this from a societal perspective: we're all going to pay the price for this. We should have invested up front.

In this case it's not possible to be certain yet, but the primary detriments to education among this cohort are probably covid lock-down and perhaps phones/social media? We got something wrong, regardless. They are less literate than previous cohorts have been for decades, apparently. Math scores are also much lower. Rates of plagiarism are so high that it's virtually impossible to address meaningfully.

All that is to say I think we should be doing a lot to ensure families and ultimately kids are able to thrive and do their best. Society ultimately profits from it, across demographics, for decades.

Quadragesimo anno [99] goes into detail on how "equal pay for equal work" has serious problems - nobody likes considering that and it sounds so unfair to our sensibilities - and then we build systems to disable that (child tax credit, healthcare, leave, etc), because it simply can't work.

[99] https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/docume...

> I get almost physically ill when I hear about kids getting harmed.

This is how Israel's war radicalized me, I stopped watching videos, but they made me depressed, burned out, angry, because everytime I watched videos, my brain started asking "what would I do if this happened to my kids, would I join Hamas? probably yes"

I got burned out from these thoughts

Kids dying makes you so sad that you would join Hamas so that you can… kill other kids?

I know what you are trying to do here with a new account (probably part of IDF unit for spam). Also checked your other comments, its solely about defending Israel and attacking Palestinians

It’s strange to me that with all the automation available to propaganda groups that they’re still so often myopic/transparent like this. I wonder when that will become very rare.

I think it's meant to be blatant. The regime benefits from it.

So you think you would've hang glided into a music festival and shot at all the young people dancing? Or you would've done this: https://saturday-october-seven.com/ ?

> shot at all the young people dancing

Easy now; there's a distinct scale to these atrocities: Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza's list of war dead, https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/oct/08...

The Guardian either wilfully or ignorantly publishes stats from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. Anyone who repeats these stats is an accessory to the terrorist regime in charge of Gaza.

It was Hamas’s war - started by a terrorist organisation butchering, abducting and raping young unarmed citizens.

The scale of the aftermath is what happens when an advanced democracy faces an existential threat from a terrorist-led neighbouring region, and must act to neutralise that threat for the safety of its citizens.

Same here, I can't even read articles on BBC about child abusers, it makes me nauseous just to skim over a title.

I've been wanting to visit courts for a while, but never had the time.

I had a look at the local courts' agendas, and I was appalled by how many SA/CSAM cases there were. Probably half of them or so. Not just to children, but there's more than one case every week of that, and this is in a population of a few hundred thousand.

Still not enough reason to do all the CSAM scanning the governments want big tech to do, but it's definitely bigger than I though. (Or just easier to gather evidence on now, so that's what gets into courts...)

I was saddened by just the headline and photo of the one last week.

The BBC and UK news readers in general absolutely love stories about child abusers, so they get prominent placing (and even a live blog on the sentencing last week)

Since I have a daughter, those "thoughts" are straight violence to the next level in my head when I hear or even see children being mistreated, I'm normally not favorable for any form of violence but strangely, some crimes suddenly gets a pass and progressive decapitation becomes reasonable.

I've thought down lines like that, too. Then I ask myself how I draw the line between who's a kid and who gets decapitated, and why anyone else should trust my judgment. After that, I just feel like violence is futile in that it will always produce motivation for more violence, and probably end up hurting more kids, the opposite of what I claim I want.

Instead I reaffirm my commitment to actual sex and emotional education, and easily accessible birth control, and access to abortion. I figure threatening to decapitate people only makes people more fucked up, not less.

>Exaggerating a bit, I felt like my old self was dead and I just happened to somehow have inherited his memories.

I had a small mental breakdown anticipating that this was going to happen while my wife was pregnant with our first. It didn't. I ended up replacing the part of my life that was video escapism with kids and kept everything else the same. Three kids in, things are going great.

>I get almost physically ill when I hear about kids getting harmed.

Replace ill with enraged and I have had the same experience. The strong emotions were a bit of a surprise.

That's how privacy-harming policies are so successful: "but think of the children !"

I don't think it's exagaration.unless you had kids young, before you had established yourself and some kind of identity, it does all go away. Who you were and your hopes and dreams all die after your newborn arrives. Your just a parent now trying to fit a life into 1 or 2 hours of free time.

Some good biological imperatives at work! Beautifully Darwinian.

The Life of Dad was a good companion through the pregnancy, even if the author preaches a bit in some areas that felt off. It explains the massive mental transformation for fathers, the impact of testosterone, and why you’re “more affected” (so to speak) by being an involved father.

I had a spell of absurd anxiety. I’m not the same person in many ways. Being a dad is frekking cool and the weirdest challenge of my life.

And to your last point… I’m such a chill, no-violence dude, but once a drunk teenager walked into us and yelled at my baby. I was shocked, but 5 seconds later I only wanted to have access to a gun to shoot that teen right there and then. Yikes.

I don’t think any children should be harmed in a conflict. The knowledge of that, or of what we used to do to children in the past, are both things that can ruin a day for me.

I used to work in digital forensics and I used to occasionally see horrible things as part of that work; child abuse material, beheading videos and the like.

I’d become largely desensitised to the content, but after becoming a parent I just couldn’t deal with the CAM anymore.

Jesus dude, could you edit that to be less explicit please.

150 of em. Just gone, for no reason. That week was agonizing.

I used to watch a lot of true crime and now if child abuse is involved I just cannot do it.

> I get almost physically ill when I hear about kids getting harmed.

Same. I literally have trouble sleeping after hearing about things like this.